Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Our colorful lives!

Being
on the road as much as we have of late has given us time to talk to members of
the NonStop community and it’s been a very interesting indeed colorful ride so
far …

There is nothing like seeing the first signs of home
appearing on the horizon. With all that has transpired these past couple of
months, crossing the state line and seeing the tourist-promotion billboard declaring
entry into Colorful Colorado was welcomed, indeed. I am going to leave it to
postings to other sites to cover all that has transpired while on the road
these past two months but suffice to say that it was most interesting, with
challenges coming at us every day. Sounds an awful lot like a typical day
inside any enterprise data center as no matter the plans, there is always
something unexpected taking place.

It has been on these travels that I have come to truly appreciate the need to
have multiples of just about everything. Suddenly primary and secondary are no
longer abstract terms as even the best prepared plans go right out the window
when unexpected situations develop. For me the big item I have been covering is
the real world experiences of those enterprises embracing hybrid IT; in
particular, those enterprises that include NonStop in their plans.

So, let me
cut to the chase – I have as yet to come across any enterprise that have gone
down this path or talked to data center managers tackling the finer details of
having mixes of traditional and cloud environments supporting anything apart from
pilots and prototypes. So, has something gone awfully wrong and are the reports
coming from industry analysts overstating reality?

To be fair, I wasn’t expecting to come across a sizable number of NonStop
users kicking off such projects and yet, I have become somewhat curious about
what is happening out there in today’s data centers where NonStop has an
established presence. Members of the NonStop community that I have met through
the years have proved to be colorful individuals, not slow to form opinions and
yet, it would seem many of them are looking at their peers within the community
running applications on NonStop to see who blinks first. Or not at all!

The
promise of NonStop participating in hybrid IT on the other hand has huge
potential upside; not just for those enterprises already convinced of the merits
of NonStop but to the industry as a whole. Who wouldn’t want better
availability, scalability and yes, security? My point here is that all too
often the messages we develop in support of a product or service have
expiration dates but when it comes to the key attributes of NonStop there are
no expiration dates. Have you ever seen a use-by date on a NonStop system?

It isn’t just the colorful characters we come across
within the NonStop community that help set directions but general mood of the
community as a whole. It’s as if collectively we have all been holding our
breath that there was going to be a breakout season for NonStop happening soon.
Don’t get me wrong. You don’t have to be colorful to make a contribution. What
I am really trying to convey is that after all these years there are still many
individuals who champion NonStop on every occasion.

For them there is
absolutely no reason on earth why any mission critical application shouldn’t
turn to NonStop as the go to first choice system for deployment. However, what is taking place is a leadership transformation
across the vendor community as many of the baby boomers begin to ease up to
take a back seat to new leaders. Whether CEOs or Managing Directors, have you
noted just how many new folks have come to help companies we know so well over
the last year or so?

If industry and financial analysts can be accused of overstating reality and the progress being made toward embracing the
hybrid IT by major enterprises is more snail like than rabbit like, should we
start to think that perhaps we have, yet again, come up with a fantastic
technology and a terrific answer when it comes to cost containment at a time
when the problem isn’t all that bad? Are we at a moment in time when it all
sounds good but no, it’s not for us just yet?

In other words, has the “Gucci smart
brigade Data Center” not struck as loud a chord with data center managers as
the “Bonds t-shirt Data Center?” (For non-Australian, you can substitute any
local brand and of course, Fruit of the Loom easily applies!) Point is, does a glamour solution hold up
when all we need is some pretty bread and butter solutions to work better?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could easily connect our silo-ed applications in a
way that gave us a hub and spoke model where the hub never failed?

Oftentimes I fret over just how caught up we can become in what’s new rather
than what works. With exceptions, rather than what is universal. NonStop at its
heart is fundamentally anything but exceptional when it comes to what NonStop
runs on – it was always conceived as a solution to a problem of quality and the
unexpected. Back in the 1970s no hardware vendor would consider talking about
their infallibility but rather talked up the RAS support they had, the
wonderful service staff they had on hand and even about backup sites you could
turn to if you data center went south!

And NonStop took all this into consideration and continued to work, 24 x
7, no matter what fell apart. In other words, it was designed to keep working
when all else failed. And there is a reason why NonStop talked up take-over
versus fail-over. NonStop wasn’t going to wait for a disaster but rather,
stepped in to head off disaster once it detected normalcy was being
compromised.

There has been a lot of news of late about the success or otherwise of cloud
vendors. IBM is talking up its revenues from cloud computing offerings even as
Microsoft has detailed how with Azure it is now making more money from clouds
than Amazon, even as industry and financial analysts endorse
Amazon as the leader. It's hard not to
apply the label “colorful” to someone like Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, who for a brief
couple of hours had more money than Microsoft’s Bill Gates just a few days ago,
but for the enterprise, all the color drains from their visage once we get past
thoughts of clouds for anything other than select IaaS opportunities.

Perhaps
the biggest potential game changer is the availability of Azure for the
enterprise to power its own on-premise cloud. This is where I see IBM having
difficulty competing over the long haul as enterprises equate cloud with x86
and there really isn’t any enthusiasm in support of Power. Given this, and that
Azure will support Hyper V, that is a little more Gucci
than it is Bonds.

According to what Microsoft is telling enterprises today, “The Hyper-V server
role in Windows Server lets you create a virtualized server computing
environment where you can create and manage virtual machines. You can run
multiple operating systems on one physical computer and isolate the operating
systems from each other. With this technology, you can improve the efficiency
of your computing resources and free up your hardware resources.” Key here, for
the NonStop community, is running multiple operating systems on one physical
computer and isolating (the impact, good or bad) the operating systems from each
other. With this, the prospect of firing up a virtualized NonStop platform
becomes rather obvious – and can be given serious consideration whether it is
Azure on-premise or Azure driving a cloud somewhere.

Here is where it is all headed. Those colorful individuals championing NonStop
within their enterprise are going to arrive at the data center one day to find
their beloved hardware is out on the loading dock. In its place, aisle after
aisle of servers racked to the ceiling with nothing left to do other than to fire up
virtualized NonStop as just another Azure-supported operating system; the
difference being that, unlike its peers running alongside of NonStop, it can
keep running the mission critical applications the enterprise depends upon when
they all falter for one reason or another, possibly just an automatic upgrade
pushed to them by none other than Microsoft. Yes, it will be NonStop that will
make Microsoft look good running some very important applications.

Calamities are always present and disaster is just a few keystrokes away. In
our world of highly networked systems, it’s good to know we will be able to
turn to one operating system that knows when to take over and not just wait for
failure. It’s very much unique to NonStop and it’s hard not to be impressed
with this model developed at a time when all hardware was flaky and
unreliable. Kind of sounds very much like today, doesn’t it? And here’s the
good news, virtualized NonStop on Azure and Hyper V is on the roadmap and
likely being tested in the labs of NonStop development even as I type these
last few words. Colorful? Well, I can’t think of anything more colorful than
seeing a lot of red faces among enterprise executives when they see what today’s
NonStop can achieve supporting their business.